Some people already submitted this news last week, but it wasn't until today that it became official: the FreeBSD team has announced the release of FreeBSD version 9.0. As you may expect from the major version number change, this is releas eis packed with new stuff.

I'll make no secret of it: the BSDs really aren't my area of expertise. I've always seen them as the more ideologically developed alternative to Linux, which tends to take a more practical approach to development. Considering my lack of knowledge, here's what the team itself considers the most important new features and changes in FreeBSD 9.0.

A new installer, bsdinstall(8) has been added and is the installer used by the ISO images provided as part of this release

The Fast Filesystem now supports softupdates journaling

ZFS updated to version 28

Updated ATA/SATA drivers support AHCI, moved into updated CAM framework

Highly Available Storage (HAST) framework

Kernel support for Capsicum Capability Mode, an experimental set of features for sandboxing support

User-level DTrace

The TCP/IP stack now supports pluggable congestion control framework and five congestion control algorithm implementations available

NFS subsystem updated, new implementation supports NFSv4 in addition to NFSv3 and NFSv2

As always, architecture support is outstanding, so no matter if you have an amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64, or sparc64 box, FreeBSD 9.0 will happily run. One note, though - a problem was found with the DVD images for amd64 and i386; new images have since been uploaded, but if you downloaded one of these images before this announcement, it's wise to re-download the image, or verify its checksum.